Riding the Iron Rooster

I said that perhaps it was not really a political puzzle at all, this violence—that it might be a psychological one, and that the aberration lay in the lost childhood of the Chinese people. I asked whether the psychology department ever dealt with this decade of frenzy and mass hysteria.

"There is no psychology department," she said.

That was the problem, really—that the Chinese dealt with the past the way they did their peculiar privacies, by drawing a veil over it and not assigning blame or responsibility except to a handful of scapegoats. Ancient history in China was lively and immediate, but more modern history receded and blurred as it became recent, and what happened ten or fifteen years ago was all silence and shadows. No wonder there was an official policy forbidding people to believe in ghosts.

But Shanghai, even bursting at the seams, was a real city, and the fact that it was haunted only made it seem more citified. Also its ships and its civic pride and sea air and all its colleges reminded me of Boston. I had it in my mind to stay longer, but one day in Shanghai I met the Wittricks and the Westbetters. They had just arrived in Shanghai yesterday and they were leaving tomorrow.

"We're going to Canton," Rick said. "Why don't you come along? It's thirty-six hours. Scenery's supposed to be breathtaking. And Canton's gorgeous."

What the hell, I thought, and said okay.

5. The Fast Train to Canton

It was always like a fire drill, getting on or off a Chinese train, with people panting and pushing; but the journey itself was a great sluttish pleasure for everyone—a big middle-aged pajama party, full of reminiscences. It seemed to me that the Chinese, who had no choice but to live the dullest lives and perform the most boring jobs imaginable—doing the same monotonous Chinese two-step from the cradle to the grave—were never happier than when on a railway journey. They liked the crowded compartments and all the chatter; they liked smoking and slurping tea and playing cards and shuffling around in their slippers—and so did I. We dozed and woke and yawned and watched the world go by.

This was the last leg of the tour group's trip before they reached Hong Kong, and I was glad to see some familiar faces.

"See this piece in the China Daily?" Ashley Relph asked, and showed me the paper.

Under the headline miracle surgery for worker who lost limb it described how a man had been more or less devoured by his stitching machine in a clothes factory, and his arm had been severed. Just reading that gave me the anxious twinges I associated with a castration complex, but there was more. The poor fellow had been rushed to the hospital, and in a landmark surgical operation his arm had been sewn back on, "and he is now receiving therapy to learn how to use it again." The article also mentioned how fingers and toes had been sewn onto workers who had lost them. It had always worked.

It's a great society for mending things, I thought. There was no need for a man to be put on the occupational scrap heap simply because his arm had been chopped off. You found a way to reattach the arm, and you sent him back to work. The epoch of invention ended a thousand years ago, and these days the Chinese were perfecting a technique for making do and mending. This was not invisible mending. It was always obvious when a thing had been patched—it was a society of patches. They patched their underwear and darned their socks and cobbled their shoes. They rewrote their slogans and painted out the Thoughts of Chairman Mao, and come to think of it, that was a form of patching, too. But Mao had spoken repeatedly of the evils of wastefulness: 'Thrift should be the guiding principle in our government expenditure.... corruption and waste are very great crimes ... never be wasteful or extravagant." An entire section of his Thoughts is entitled "Building Our Country Through Diligence and Frugality."

One of the great differences between China under Mao and China under Deng was that the Mao mania for patching and mending had begun to subside, pride in poverty was regarded now as old hat, and the Dengists liked things that were brand-new. New clothes were now so cheap that no one had to waste time mending them. Yet I was sure that it was this make-do-and-mend philosophy that had inspired these medical advances and miracles with amputees.